What We're Meant to Be
by brinshannara
Summary: A one-shot depicting what I think was going on with Alex the day after her conversation with Maggie where Maggie thinks Alex is gay. Loose follow-up to my Five Times Alex Looked at Maggie fic.


(A/N: Loose follow-up to my Five Times Alex Looked at Maggie fic. Meant as a palate cleanser between the first set and the next set I do, so you should probably read that before this. This scene between Kara and Alex was delightful on several levels and, since Alex Danvers has taken over my brain, I thought I'd examine what she was thinking during it.)

 **What We're Meant to Be**

Alex had barely slept. Her mind had kept racing all through the night. She couldn't distract herself, she couldn't push her feelings aside and nothing seemed to shut her brain up, not even the fair amount of whiskey she'd had the night before.

So at 5:30 in the morning, she'd gotten out of her bed, grumbling to herself as she made it. It had been a mess. The top sheet had come untucked during her restless night and had somehow gotten rolled into a ball. The comforter was half on the floor and half on the bed. It was a physical reminder of her unpleasant night of thinking.

 _'How could...?'_ she thought to herself, tucking the last of the covers in and then plumping her pillows. She forced the thought back down.

She headed to the washroom, used the facilities and then took her morning shower. It was as she was putting the conditioner into her hair that the thoughts returned.

 _'But do I *really*...?'_ the thought came up, unbidden.

"Stop it, Alex," she told herself, firmly.

She exited the shower, toweled herself dry, then patted her hair with it before she wrapped the towel around her head in a practiced move. She pulled her bathrobe from the hook on the back of the door and stood there, in her bathroom, waiting for the fan to draw up most of the steam.

Alex reached out and wiped the fog from the mirror with her hand, gazing pensively at her reflection. She looked the same as she had yesterday, before she and Maggie had spoken. She felt more or less the same, barring these thoughts racing through her head at a mile a minute.

With a sigh, she left the bathroom and proceeded to go through her morning routine. First, coffee, particularly that day, as she'd barely had any sleep. Then, a light breakfast, followed by her brushing her teeth, drying her hair and applying a bit of makeup.

 _'I wear makeup,'_ she thought to herself, _'so I can't be...'_ She paused. _'Maggie wears makeup,'_ she admitted to herself. She made a face and went back to her room to change for work.

Fifteen minutes later, she was at the DEO's downtown offices. It wasn't even seven in the morning. Going to and leaving from the DEO at odd hours was normal for everyone who worked there, but there had been no news about the gang using the alien weapons. There was no reason for Alex to be there, at least not that early.

Except for her brain.

So she studied reports. She checked in on the progress of a potential countermeasure. She had internal meetings. She filled out some long-overdue paperwork. She did everything she could do to ensure that she wouldn't have to think about Detective Maggie Sawyer and their conversation they'd had the day before, nor any of the related thoughts she'd had since then.

And she'd had a _lot_.

Finally, by about four in the afternoon, she'd had enough. She was tired and nothing was happening at work, so Alex decided to go home. Except, she realized, as she stepped out of the DEO office, she didn't want to go home. Home would just mean more thinking about... things. And she wasn't really ready to think about things.

Instead, she stopped at a doughnut shop and bought a doughnut. Just the one. After the night she'd had, she certainly deserved it. She found herself wandering towards Kara's apartment building and pulled out her phone.

"Hey, you coming home anytime soon?" she texted her sister.

"Actually, yes," came the reply, "I cannot wait to get out of here."

"Cool. Meet you at your place soon."

"Sounds good," Kara replied.

It was less than five minutes later when Alex, leaning with her back to the wall by Kara's door, in the middle of eating her doughnut, heard her sister's footsteps. She frowned. Something was off with her sister, she could tell.

"A doughnut?" exclaimed Kara, as she rounded the corner from the staircase. "You never eat sugar in the middle of the day. What's wrong?" her sister demanded, as she strode down the hallway, towards her door and put the key into the lock.

Alex sighed, tired and worn down. "I'm feeling confused about something," she admitted, honestly. She pivoted away from her troubles fairly quickly, though, reminding herself that her little sister's issues should come first. "Your steps were exceptionally stompy just now, you all right?"

Kara opened the door and dropped her keys in their spot on the bookshelf by the entryway. "Where do I start?!" she asked, evidently frustrated as she stormed into her apartment. Alex shut the door after entering.

"Mark almost got fired today."

Alex blinked. "Who?"

"Mark." Kara groaned at herself. "Mike! Mon-El!"

Alex nodded and sat herself down with her half-eaten doughnut at the kitchen table while Kara dropped her purse and coat off in what was considered the bedroom section of the loft.

"He doesn't take his job seriously. At all. It's really like he's never worked a day in his life!" she complained.

"Well, he is from a different planet," Alex reminded her sister, gently.

" _I'm_ from a different planet!" Kara exclaimed. "And I had to deal with the awkwardness of seventh grade when I first got here!" she said, coming back into the kitchen and opening the fridge to get a drink. "I... I helped him get a new identity!" Kara said, frustrated. "I, I helped him get an internship." She placed her drink on the kitchen table.

Alex looked at the green glass bottle on the table and casually pointed at it, as if to say 'where's mine?', which sent Kara back to the refrigerator for another.

"I even got him a new pair of glasses for a disguise in case he wants to put on a cape and help people the way I do. He has everything he needs and yet he is still a disaster!"

Alex reached out for her drink. "Well, that's the problem," she said, having understood everything Kara was saying.

"What, the glasses? I can take those back but I don't think it's going to make any difference!"

Alex smiled at her younger sister, patiently. She reached out her right hand and patted the table, once. "Sit," she said.

Kara looked at her uncertainly, but sat down anyway. Alex smiled. It felt good to be the big sister. She felt comfortable in the role and she knew that she had some insight into this particular situation.

"When you first arrived at our house?" she began, "I thought, _'Finally! I have a sister!'_."

"An alien sister," Kara muttered.

"Even better," Alex smiled. "But," she said, "I still wanted you to be just like me. To do everything that I did. So," she continued, "I dragged you out to science fairs."

Kara groaned. "Ooh, those were so boring," she complained.

"Made you watch scary movies," Alex added.

"What do you have against a good old romantic comedy?!" Kara asked, for millionth time. It was a long-standing debate.

"Forced you to listen to the music that I liked," Alex said.

Kara's face reflected the torture that experience had been. "Yeah, your punk rock phase was very strange."

"But, I finally... I let it go. Let you do your own thing. Find your own hobbies. Listen to your own weird music," Alex said, making a face.

"Weird?! Uh, *NSYNC, first of all, is not weird, and, second of all, they are amazing."

Alex smiled. "Mon-El is not you," she said, gently. "Just like you're not me. So what works for you, might not work for him." She took a breath and stood, pacing a bit. "You know, people just have to... have to figure out what works for them." She turned back to look at Kara. "Who they are, inside. What they're meant to be." And suddenly, Alex realized what she was saying.

Who was she, inside? What was she meant to be? Was she straight? Was she gay? Was she somewhere in between? What was she, Alex Danvers, outside of a big sister? Outside of the DEO? That's what she needed to figure out. What worked for _her_.

Kara sighed. "So you're saying the job and the sweater and the glasses are a bit too much?" she asked, sheepishly.

"Not everyone can rock argyle like you do," she said, kindly.

Her younger sister sighed again, understanding what Alex had been saying and realizing that maybe she'd gone about things with Mon-El the wrong way.

Alex watched apprehensively as Kara scrunched up her face. "God," she said, lightly hitting the kitchen table, "you came here wanting to talk to me about something and I haven't shut my mouth," she said, "I'm sorry, what is it? What's wrong?" Kara asked, genuinely apologetic and wanting to help.

 _'Oh, God,'_ Alex thought, feeling the edges of panic starting to flare up inside her. She took a breath. This was Kara, whom she loved. Kara, who loved her. Staring at her from across the table, Alex briefly considered lying to her sister, then made the conscious decision to tell her the truth about what had been going on. She didn't have a real choice but to believe that Kara would be okay with anything she said. So she took one more breath and held Kara's gaze. "I," she began.

And then someone knocked at Kara's door, leaving Alex almost grateful enough to sink to her knees in relief.

Kara x-rayed the door. "What is _she_ doing here?" she asked.

Alex's heart leapt at the possibility that it was Maggie, for some reason, but it turned out to be Lena Luthor. After the somewhat awkward introduction and conversation, Lena had left and Kara had asked Alex if she minded if she went over to L Corp as Supergirl to talk to Lena.

"No, it's fine," Alex had said. "Go."

Kara had smiled. "We'll talk about this soon, okay?"

"Sure," she had replied, then headed out of Kara's apartment. She smiled as she saw a blur of red and blue soar through the darkening, evening sky.

She wandered home, thinking about what she'd told Kara about Mon-El, thinking about turning that advice around on herself. She sunk into her couch at home, feeling more empowered than frightened, and let the stream of questions resume.

 _*Why were you excited that it might be Maggie at the door?*_

 _'Because,'_ she thought to herself, _'I like hanging out with Maggie.'_

 _*Why?*_

 _'Because Maggie is pretty damn cool.'_

 _*And?*_

Alex cleared her throat and took a deep breath. "And because," she said, aloud, for the very first time, "I... I'm attracted to her."

The open admission of her attraction to Maggie was terrifying, but exhilirating. It made _sense_ to her. It explained so much about how she had been feeling about Maggie - how she'd felt when she realized the detective was into women, the jealousy she'd felt when Maggie had run off to her date and had turned her down for drinks in favour of time with her girlfriend. The upset knot she had in her stomach after witnessing Maggie kissing her girlfriend in front of her... It made _sense_. She was jealous because she liked Maggie herself. **_In that way._**

Of course, the idea of being attracted to another woman, it turned her entire world upside-down. But somehow, in the chaos, the fact that she had feelings for Maggie... it made it seem a little less scary. Even just admitting it to herself, here in the safety of her own apartment, felt good. It wasn't just a hypothetical concept, there was an actual woman for whom she had actual feelings. A real attraction.

What that admission meant for the rest of her life was something yet to be determined, of course, but Alex Danvers had done enough soul searching for the last day or so. She slept well, that night, satisfied with the amount of progress she'd made towards finding out who she was and what worked for her, even though she knew there was more work to be done.


End file.
